As one of the hundred or so residents who participated in the first Walk/ Bike Northampton public forum on March 7, I was pleased to see the city administration soliciting pedestrian and cyclist input. But as a car-free adult who for a decade has biked and walked all over the Upper Valley, I have to agree with another forum attendee, Jasper Lapienski, who told a Gazette reporter, “We’re building an infrastructure we have no interest in maintaining.”
I’ve lived in the South Street neighborhood in Northampton for more than nine years. In 2012, the city used grant monies to create “traffic-calming” devices on South Street. The contractor widened the bicycle lanes, used bright green reflective paint to stripe between those lanes and the vehicle lanes, and painted green “bike boxes” on the pavement at side streets to alert motorists to cyclists’ presence in those areas.
The company also created a corrugated asphalt rumble strip next to the green bike lane so drivers would know immediately when they were veering into cyclist territory.
Although one or two Gazette letter-writers joked about South Street looking as if it were ready for a St. Patrick’s Day parade, those of us who navigate the road without a vehicle were pleased with the project after years of planning.
Just one slight problem: the work was done in October. As anyone who’s lived in New England during an average winter knows, road work needs to be done in spring. By the time that winter was over, little was left of our gleaming green bike lanes, and the rest of the paint has been completely ground off the road during the subsequent three winters.
As I’ve watched green paint bits being plowed onto our neighborhood sidewalks, as I’ve sat on my bike at the curb each evening, waiting to cross South Street as dozens of drivers zoom through the crosswalk at the side street on which I live, I’ve reached a couple of conclusions.
First, nothing is going to create the “safe streets” that Northampton’s grant-funded consulting firms keep talking about unless we have money in the city budget to pay police officers to ticket motorists. Drivers know they can zip through residential neighborhoods without considering others’ safety – a number of people crossing South Street and other major arteries have been seriously injured, and some killed, in recent years. I find the statistics appalling, but apparently the fatalities are considered the “collateral damage” of driving in this city and in the rest of the United States.
Second, the city needs to budget money for the Department of Public Works to maintain bike and pedestrian infrastructure, and to do that maintenance in April or May, so the striped lanes and crosswalks are visible for eight or nine months rather than being sanded off the roads shortly after the paint is applied. Until funds are applied to cyclist and pedestrian projects, I have to conclude they’re merely green window-dressing.
Michele Spring-Moore is a local writer who’s lived in Northampton and been a member of the Pioneer Valley chapter of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition (MassBike) for 10 years.